From Presence to Power

Jul 16, 2026 | Maryruth Belsey Priebe
Environmental Peacebuilding Association

From Presence to Power 

Not whether women are in the room, but whether women decide 

Women's Leadership Lunch, June 18, 2026, Ottawa · Quotes are drawn from facilitators' notes and participants' takeaway cards, and are deliberately unattributed

On a June afternoon in Ottawa, women practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and activists working where environmental conflict meets peacebuilding gathered around six tables during the EnPAx Conference in Ottawa to work through four questions in small facilitated groups. The session — “From Presence to Power: Women Environmental Peacebuilders Connect” — was designed as a networking space, and what the notes record is something closer to a collective case by women who in many cases had never met before.

The argument, in short, is that women's expertise in environmental peacebuilding already exists and already works, which means the real problem is not capacity but recognition — and, more pointedly, what happens when recognition arrives without power.

“Not necessarily innovative — but persistent, and not recognized”

When asked what innovative practices women leaders are using in natural resource mediation and climate adaptation, almost every group pushed back on the question before answering it. One set of notes opened on a challenge — innovation: what qualifies, and who is perceiving your work? — and another landed on the line that could have titled the whole event: women's practices are “not necessarily innovative but persistent + not recognized.” What outsiders code as a capacity gap, the room described as a recognition gap, pointing to work women are already doing, often invisibly:

Stewarding land and ecosystems — ancestral knowledge as living practice, including women's central role as stewards of the land in Ethiopia's Gadaa system.

• Acting as early-warning systems — “women situation rooms” that surface signs of crisis before institutions do.
• Peacebuilding in private — rooftop gardens in Lebanon quietly doing mediation work that no project logframe would capture.
• Holding space for healing — carrying communities through trauma in places living with conflict.

Yet outsiders still default to male interlocutors even in places where women are the acknowledged elders and knowledge keepers, which is why the most practical innovation named all afternoon was also the simplest: just ask women what they need and respond, because innovation emerges from listening.

The Trap: Representation Without Power

If the room agreed that the expertise exists, it was equally clear-eyed about what often happens next. One group warned that “having all women doesn't mean it's feminist,” arguing that gender mainstreaming can produce a token gap in which representation stands in for any real redistribution of decision-making, while another described the same mechanism in structural terms: institutions are “not changing structures, but taking power and hierarchy, yet expecting women to share anyway without positions of decision-making.” The result is a double burden, with women carrying the social expectations of sharing knowledge and caregiving while remaining outside the rooms where decisions are made. One group followed the thought to its uncomfortable conclusion, observing that recognition of women can itself turn into instrumentalization.

Rather than counting who is present, the discussions proposed a different test: whether women decide. As one group's notes put it, women-led projects mean making sure women lead and decide — not simply that women appear in the staffing plan.

Don't build a bridge — move the room
The bridge metaphor itself came under attack when one group argued that “grassroots is a narrative invented by policy,” observing that community organizations, which persist for decades, are in fact the permanent actors while the policy processes courting them come and go. So perhaps it isn't grassroots knowledge that needs to travel upward, but the policy space that needs to move.

The groups were specific about mechanisms that already work:

• Local-language radio — in Kenya, radio lets people raise concerns and hold conversations in their own languages.
• Bottom-up, intersectional dialogues — built on trust that is long-term by nature, and for which there is no shortcut.
• Continuous institutional spaces — standing channels for participation in decision-making, rather than ad hoc, one-off consultations.
• Meetings beyond capitals — because “it is actually not expensive for donors to have meetings with people and bring discussions away from capitals.”

They were equally concrete about what keeps people out, insisting that these are design choices rather than constraints:

• Language — “we don't have time to translate” is a decision, and when translation does happen it can be wrong.
• Access — literacy, digital access, and political spaces that remain closed to people with disabilities.
• Geography — distance from the capitals where decision-making concentrates.

And for those already inside policy spaces, one group offered a discipline that begins with positionality — recognize this space is not mine — because the people with the knowledge have to be in the room.

The Turn Inward

Asked about systemic barriers, the groups could have pointed at funders and governments and stopped, and the external list is certainly familiar: money and the conditions attached to it, hierarchies of funders and institutions, and data regimes in which qualitative and traditional knowledge loses out to “Western-approved” evidence. One group wrote the conclusion in capital letters: BARRIERS ARE STRUCTURAL.

The distinctive note of the afternoon, though, was reflexive. Universities and INGOs reproduce the very hierarchy the field claims to dismantle, with women doing the fieldwork while men make the decisions; education systems remain patriarchal and Eurocentric in both paradigm and curriculum; and even well-intentioned frameworks can do harm, as when the “imposition of gender equality” overrides local informal norms that already empower women. The closing injunction was aimed squarely at the mirror: make sure we are not reproducing barriers ourselves.

The counterweight the groups offered was everyday practice, the small register in which hierarchy is either reproduced or interrupted:

• “Microfeminism acts” — small defaults, like generalizing in the feminine rather than the masculine.
• Mentorship — creating opportunities for junior colleagues as a way of dismantling unjust structures.
• Solidarity over competition — recommending and platforming other women's work.
• Real allyship — renegotiating care work with men without adding to women's load.

In Their Own Words

As the lunch ended, each participant wrote down one thing she was taking back to her work, and the cards read like the discussion distilled:

• “Make sure we are not reproducing barriers ourselves in our own work + practice.”
  “Put women in front + listen.”
• “Bringing Indigenous women — physically in the room — into policy spaces: the people that are actually affected.”
• “What would it look like to promote horizontal leadership among women in my INGO?”
• “How do we decolonize concepts of gender equality and leadership to empower communities?”
• “Dialogue is the key to innovation.”
• “I want to uplift and support women's work and women in general in all spaces I participate. Continue with my microfeminism.”
• “There are so many people and organizations around the world working to make things better — we are not alone on our missions, so stay hopeful!”

What We're Carrying Forward

An hour of discussion resolved less than it opened — deliberately so — and the questions left unanswered now read as an agenda:

• How do we protect women who are already acting as protectors?
• How do we work with men as allies without giving women extra work?
• How do funders and governments learn to see Indigenous women as knowledge keepers and early-warning leaders — and how does that grow into government systems?
• Who bears the cost of translation, and how do we reach women without access to technology?
• How do we unlearn the systems we work inside without reproducing them — down to rewriting early education and curricula?

The event's name described a direction of travel, and the room seemed to agree that presence has largely been achieved: women are everywhere in this field, holding land, water, knowledge, and communities together. Power — who decides, who is funded, whose knowledge counts — is the unfinished work, and while the lunch ended, that work did not.